Perhaps the largest insecurity that I have struggled with my whole life is displacement. Since I was a little kid in grade school I have always felt different from my peers. Even though I have never truly had no friends, I have always felt more or less alone. Conversations never came easily to me and I often found it hard to relate to my peers, something that I covered up by spending most of time in extra-curriculars where all of my interactions with people could be goal-focused. I found it much easier to communicate if there was an intentional end to aim for. Nothing made me more anxious than small talk.

During my year in Kerr this insecurity reached outlandish proportions. I became fixated on the communication wall I perceived between myself and other people and began to question whether or not I was real. These delusions came in several incarnations. At first I became suspicious that the people on campus were not real, as if I was part of a divinely orchestrated version of The Truman Show. That morphed into the thought that I might be an alien, which would explain the distance I felt between myself and the people around me. At one point I thought that I might be the second coming of the Old Testament prophet Jeremiah, sent to warn indifferent people of the vapidity of their existence. All of this was brought on by the latent fear that the distance between myself and any given person prevented either of us from meaning anything to each other. I feared that I did not matter to other people, and by virtue of being unable to really relate to others, they could not matter to me. Whenever I was overtaken with these delusions I would lay on the wooden floor of my room and visually trace the patterns in the plaster of my ceiling. It was not uncommon for me to lie on that floor for hours at a time.